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3/18/10

Getting Pied by Vegans

I sure hope it never happens to me. It seems some vegans feel a special hostility for animal advocates who are ex-vegans (the woman who was pied), pre-vegans, or non-vegans (me). You can see this if you frequent abolitionist blogs and twitter feeds. It is disconcerting--in fact saddening.

Note at the end of the post how Smith manages to collapse distinctions between pie-throwing types and the good people at the Humane Society. You see, it's all one big organism. The tentacle that threw the pie is connected to the same octopus as the tentacle that's trying to pass a referendum in Ohio right now. (Which reminds me--I need to send the Humane Society a check. I want that referendum to succeed.)

Smith makes the same mistake about ethicists that he does about animal organizations. No, it's not one big organism. It's not even two organisms--welfare and rights. No, we don't have to choose between the very conservative idea that we should keep doing all the usual things to animals, but do them nicely, and the radical idea that every rat, pig, and mouse has super-strength rights just like ours.

Since Smith calls one of his blogs a "bioethics seminar" I'm going to offer him a reading list. Outlooks inbetween "rights" and "welfare" include utilitarianism, Martha Nussbaum's "capacities" approach to animals in Frontiers of Justice, and David DeGrazia's approach in Taking Animals Seriously. And mine, in Animalkind.